


Euphor

by scavengethestars



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Ben is a psychic, F/M, Rey is impulsive, kind of
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-18
Updated: 2020-04-18
Packaged: 2021-03-01 20:53:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,433
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23723392
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scavengethestars/pseuds/scavengethestars
Summary: “Yes,” he abridges the truth straight into a lie, schooling his features out of amusement and into seriousness.  “I’m the psychic.”
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey & Ben Solo | Kylo Ren, Rey/Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 6
Kudos: 15





	Euphor

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from a Novo Amor song of the same name!

“You’re the palm reader,” she asks, or maybe more accurately _accuses_ , her eyes traveling down and then back up his body. Her mouth is a flat, straight line. She’s holding onto the blue bag over her shoulder so tightly that he immediately assumes she is in a rush. Her eyes reflect that urgency as she waits for his answer.

“Oh,” he starts, blinking, and he can’t begin to understand why she is asking him this question.

“The psychic,” she tries again, as if that title might be more correct. She blinks back at him, a customer wondering why he is hedging on taking her business.

“The psychic,” he repeats, almost laughing, and his gaze floats up to the plate glass window behind her. There is a simplistic hand painted in black, fingers spread, and white stenciled lettering through its center. ‘First Order Readings.’ Someone else’s business, in someone else’s office, in this same small building. He has no sign of his own yet.

He starts to correct her – his mouth is open to do so – and as he brings his attention back to her face, his brain begins counting the freckles spattered across the bridge of her nose. Her hazel eyes are bright with fool’s gold. Her hair is half-heartedly up, in a quarter-hearted bun. It is chestnut, shining a woody red where the light blazes against it, like the sheening coat of a freshly-brushed sorrel horse. She has a harried sense about her; a girl on her lunch break. She is small but feathered with bright energy. She wants someone to read her palms. Her eyes are insistent on seeing secrets. She is looking at him as if he could show her.

“Yes,” he abridges the truth straight into a lie, schooling his features out of amusement and into seriousness. “I’m the psychic.”

\---

“I just moved in,” he explained, in case she had been wondering about the cardboard box in his arms, leading her down the hallway to his office. It was, truly, his office – he’d just rented it, and he was moving in. His profession was not in deciphering the lines on strangers’ palms, but the single desk and two chairs in the otherwise empty space suggested little else.

“Shouldn’t you have known I was coming?” she asked, clearly uninterested in the box, and, Ben felt, cheeky as hell.

“That’s not how it works,” he corrected, making his voice sigh with boredom, as if he was challenged in this way all the time. Setting the box down beside his desk with a riffling of paper, he turned to look at her, aiming to accuse her as she had accused him. She obviously knew nothing about psychics, and she wasn’t going to question his non-existent capabilities right from the start. “Go ahead and have a seat.”

“Right, well, I only have twenty minutes, so I hope you’re not too slow,” she pointed out, taking in the bare walls of the square room with neither approval nor disapproval, as if she’d seen better and worse, and then dropped to take a seat in the chair situated across from his desk.

Ben had hardly stepped to take his own seat, had hardly lowered himself in stately consideration onto the cold metal before she’d laid her hands out on the desk between them, palms up, wrists as thin as a bird’s dream. He could see the rivers of her veins beneath her skin. He glanced up, bemused.

“Well?” she prompted, her thin fingers lightly bent, as if she might just as quickly ball her hands back up and take them away.

“No,” Ben decided, easily drawing confidence from the young woman’s chaotic energy. Her rocky waves gave him an obstacle to focus on and carve through. Her odd, impatient fear moored him.

She _was_ afraid, probably of whatever she suspected he was about to tell her once he had opened her sweaty palms with his masterful gaze and pried away her secrets. There was no changing what was written there. She was being chased by guilt, maybe. Her tension was a thread that she had placed directly into his hands. He kept his demeanor cool, refusing to let her rush him.

“That’s not how this works,” he repeated, waving her hands off of his desk. He watched as the shadow of a violent storm passed across her high cheekbones. But what could she say? She didn’t even know what psychic she’d come in to see.

“You’re my guest,” he went on, although if that had been true, he’d done a terrible job of making her comfortable. She was sitting with her shoulders braced forward, her hands slowly sliding back into her lap, wearing a grey sweater with the silhouette of a bipedal dinosaur in the center. She was tense and shifty. Her eyes hardened into a dog’s baleful stare.

“Tell me your name,” he suggested, and she threw her arms up as if she’d just been pelted with a small rock.

“You’re a _psychic_ ,” she fumed, and Ben was more defensive of his impromptu profession than he ever had been of any of job rooted in reality, holding his hands up.

“Listen, it’s clear that you _think_ you have some concept of how this works, but I’m telling you that you’re wrong. I can tell you what the stars whisper about you, but I’m not some carnival knock-off. If you’re looking for someone to tell you what you already know, I might suggest going to visit your mother.”

He didn’t know where it came from; some patched memory of stargazing and circus tickets. Astrology and fairgrounds. That was what she was expecting, that was what she was fishing for, but the feisty gleam in her eyes betrayed something more. From what he’d learned in a very short span of time, he expected her to wheel out of the room. He waited for her to shove her chair backwards and tell him he was a phony. He waited for her to accuse him of wasting three of her precious twenty minutes.

He wasn’t sure what had snared her attention – that bit about stars whispering, or the jab about her mother? She sat still, regarding him, the edges of her still wavering furiously like heat on sand. She stayed seated, making her face as impassive as she was able, which found only a fraction of success. She struck him as a feline that would either bat at him gently, curiously, or clamp her jaws around his head and twist.

“I don’t just _know_ things,” he continued, finding his rhythm in her silence, leaning back as if this, too, was a conundrum he often found himself guiding amateurs through. “I _read_ things. I read what your body tells, ah, what your _hands_ tell me, and I read your energy. I read your aura, and I let the stars speak through me.”

He was banking, quite arrogantly, on his assumption that she’d stayed because of that bit about the stars. He realized once he’d spoken that it was a gamble – maybe she’d found it predictable or blasé – but she didn’t rise from her seat, and instead her head had come to a very slight tilt. She was still studying him with that bright glint in her eye, predation or fascination, he didn’t know. He met her gaze evenly and made swallowing the knot that caught in his throat as smooth as possible.

“I can’t just _know_ your name, it’s not-”

“My name is Kira.”

He hesitated. Something in her voice didn’t catch right. She was watching him with a new swell of confidence, she was glowing with it, and he knew she was lying.

“Kira?”

“That’s right.”

“Is that your middle name?”

The corners of her lips twitched into a growl. “ _No_ , that’s my name.”

She paused, and then continued through his silence. “You don’t believe me? You can’t tell me my name, but you can tell me when it’s wrong?”

“I just don’t think it’s right to proceed if we’re not both being honest.” He couldn’t explain why he didn’t believe her. It just didn’t seem to fit. He searched her face as she searched his and maybe her energy was too high-strung, maybe her curiosity was too genuine, but she rolled her eyes away first and sighed crisply.

“Fine. My name is Rey.” She presented her hands to him once more, the sleeves bumped up past her wrists, given the clearance to proceed. He looked down at her palms and carefully sat forward.

He touched his middle fingers to his thumbs and then reached for her palms, softly, before she was piping up again. “Aren’t you going to make me pay?”

She was _annoying_.

“I know you’re going to pay,” he shrugged, provoking her with the inanity of it, and she snapped at him.

“You _know_? You don’t know my name but you somehow know that I’m go-”

“Can you please be quiet? I’m trying to work here.”

Her fingers curled with unspent fury, but she did fall silent, and he brought his fingers to the sides of her hands. Ghosting them gently forward, he let his fingers brush—

“You don’t need to touch me,” she advised, inching her hands back and then letting them rest again. “Just tell me what you see.”

He considered revising that fact for her, but a glance up met the indignation written across her face and he blew the impulse out in a long exhale as he kept his hands separate from the smaller pair, cupped around the space she’d demanded between them. He adopted a bookish expression and squinted at her palms, leaning in. After a moment of thought, he picked up the pair of glasses sitting on his desk and slid them onto his face. He thought he heard her snort.

“A long life,” he noted first, and then she did snort, abrasively, and he looked up.

“What now?”

“Everyone says that. Everyone says, ‘oh, you have a long life line.’”

So she’s made these brash appearances in the offices of unsuspecting psychics before? Did she berate them all for being unsuspecting?

“Do you have a problem with that?”

“I don’t think it’s true.”

“You doubt that it’s true when more than one psychic has seen it?”

“That makes me think they’re making it up.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. I’m telling you that you’re going to have a long life.”

“Tell me something else.”

Now he can’t help but glare back at her, dropping his attention down as she opens her fingers beneath his gaze. Does she want him to tell her that she’s going to suffer a terrible death in the next hour? That in five minutes something horrendous is going to happen to someone she loves? Does she just want to hear that the future is full of surprises, both good and bad?

He begins to close his hands in around hers until he remembers that he was instructed not to, wiggling his fingers instead and breathing out a low and scholarly ‘hmm’. The lines on her palms are fine and only vaguely symmetrical. Her fingertips curl in as he studies her faintly mottled skin.

“Oh, here we go,” he speaks the invisible breakthrough out loud, and she leans in closer in preparation to see it with him. He nods as if the evidence of what he has just observed is all neatly coming together in a scientific conclusion.

“You’re going to find something. Sort of like treasure-hunting. You’re going to find what you’ve been looking for.” He steals a glance up, unsure if she’ll buy this too-general, obviously-generic outlook. Everyone is, after all, looking for something. Maybe that’s not what she wanted to hear. But she’s studying her palms, her brows ticked together in thought, and then she looks back up.

“And the stars?” she asks.

He keeps her forested gaze locked with his own for a long moment, willing the ineffable stars to bestow upon him some piece of insight he can pass along to her. A shard of meaning that will reflect back to her a piece of her own soul and leave her satisfied. She’s earnest, even if she’s trying to look like she doesn’t care what the stars have to say one way or another. Her hands are open in front of him.

“They think you need to slow down,” he decides on their behalf, closing his eyes to enhance the effect that he’s listening to a distant whisper. “There’s a sense of fear around you, but you don’t need to be afraid.” He opens his eyes and she’s regarding him skeptically.

“What else did they say?” she demands.

He blinks, affronted. “They don’t tell me everything at once.”

“So I have to come back?”

“I can only tell you what they’re telling m-”

She rises and reaches into her bag before he’s done speaking. He doesn’t bother finishing, eyes falling to the twenty-dollar bill she produces and then tosses onto the desk.

“Is that enough? I’m not a psychic.”

He glances at the door and immediately feels a pang of guilt. He can’t _charge_ her, but she’s zipping her bag closed and studying him from where she stands.

“Thanks, Kylo.”

His brow becomes a hard, puzzled shelf. She lifts her chin to indicate an envelope that’s lying to his left on the desk. It’s addressed to the name she’s just read.

“Oh,” he says, once again almost correcting her and then choosing not to. His lips come together as he reaches for the envelope, as if he can change the fact that she’s already seen it.

“I guess I don’t need to tell you when I’m coming back. Guess you already know,” she considers, eyes roving around the sparse office. “Or maybe not.” She turns to step out the door.

He walks her out, from two or three steps behind, to the main doors of the quiet building, and she pauses there. She looks at the black hand painted on the window, the advertisement for First Order Readings, and then looks back at him.

“You should have something a little brighter. It’s hard to see from the street. I almost missed it.”

“Well,” he says, flicking a playful smile. “I knew you’d find it.”

She rolls her eyes as she goes, but once she’s out on the sidewalk, he watches as she turns, takes a few steps back, and spends a moment memorizing the buildings on either side of his own. She takes the window with the black hand, freezes it, and pins it down somewhere on her mental map.


End file.
